A central story in this week’s Parshah, is the struggle between Jacob and an angel; who is traditionally seen as the angel of Esau. This struggle seemingly ends in triumph for Jacob, forcing the angel to bless him and change his name to Israel. Yet this is only part of the story. It is significant that Jacob does not emerge from the fight unscathed. As the sun rises, we find him limping from the wounds he sustained in the fight; in consequence of which we are forbidden to eat the sciatic nerve. Though Jacob has emerged triumphant, he is permanently scarred by the experience. A similar theme can be found in the fact that, unlike Abraham, Jacob’s name change is not absolute. He is still called Jacob; indeed much more than he is called Israel. Even his descendants are called Jacob by some of the prophets. It appears that his struggle with the angel was not the unmitigated success that we might suppose. Jacob may have fought with the divine and the human and prevailed, but he cannot escape the trauma of the struggle. He may have turned into something spiritually superior but he still remains a human being. The same is true of his descendants: the Jewish people. We too have struggled and prevailed. We have overcome empires and superpowers; survived Inquisition and Holocaust. Yet we are also not unscathed by our experiences. We have heard the voice of G-d at Mt Sinai and produced the ideas that rule our world. Yet we still remain human. Yet too often Jewish history is presented as a triumph of survival, forgetting those that did not survive. The fact that Jews are part of an eternal people, does not obviate the fact that we as individuals are mortal. We, like Jacob, are traumatised by our history of struggle. We bear the deep scars of millennia of persecution. Yet, like Jacob, we often gloss over this psychology, dwelling instead on our successes. Jacob paid a price for this amnesia. The story of Joseph is a residue of his struggle with his own brother. The Jewish people also suffer from a lack of understanding of our own psychological wounds. We often do not understand our own phobias, and the actions they lead to. We thus often instinctively react in certain ways which are not in our own best interest. All of us as individuals must seek to know ourselves. The same is true of our collective Jewish self. By ignoring the living consequences of the past, we endanger the future. We may indeed be eternal Israel, but we still remain human, uncertain and scarred: Jacob.

ALIYAH BY ALIYAH SYNOPSIS

 

Rishon	Jacob hears Esau is coming to meet him, is afraid and prays.
Sheni	He sends presents, wrestles with an angel in the middle of the night and has his name changed to Israel.
Shelishi	Esau arrives, is friendly and is introduced to the family .
Revi’i	Jacob politely declines an invitation to visit Esau at home and buys some land outside Shechem.
Chamishi	Dinah is raped by the local prince’s son and Simon And Levy use deception to massacre the whole town.
Shishi	Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin and is buried in Efrat. Isaac dies. The descendants of Esau.
Shevi’i	The chiefs and monarchs of Edom.
Haftorah	Hosea: 11;7-12;12: The sins of the Northern Kingdom.

 Sidra Statistics

Parshat Vayishlach

·         has 154 verses ;

·         is the 8th in Genesis, 8th in the Torah

·         longest in Genesis, 3rd longest in the Torah

·         has one pos mitzvah.